If this Be Intelligent Design?

There has been much public discourse, in recent times, about the validity of the theory of Intelligent Design and its role in the origins of the universe. As the lack of supporting evidence for the existence of a deity becomes more glaring in the information age, a lukewarm alternative, the theory of Intelligent Design has come into prominence of late. Supporters and/or believers in this theory insist that the world around us functions so well that it could not be the result of random occurrences over billions of years and therefore must be the result of the efforts, or the creation of a guiding intellegence.

For the sake of discussion, I'll stipulate that man, planet earth and the rest of the universe came about as a result of Intelligent Design. Let's examine the end product of this design.

The earth is essentially a gigantic ball, composed of a molten nickel-iron core, a semi-molten mantle and a thin weathered crust floating on the mantle. This crust, upon which we build our homes and live out our lives, is not solid, stable or continuous. It is composed of vast irregular segments geologists call Tectonic Plates. There are fourteen of them. Imagine a round egg with multiple, irregular cracks completely around its shell. These plates float on the mantle of the earth. In our egg analogy, sections of shell float on the liquid yolk. The tectonic plates drift
in different directions and at varying speeds. The edges grind constantly against each other and provide a release for the pressure and core heat radiating up from the partially molten mantel. The heat is generated by pressure and the decay of radioactive isotopes contained within the molten core. The result of this release of heat and motion is sink holes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis when the quakes take place on the floor of the oceans.

These "natural" disasters have killed hundreds of millions of human beings over the millennia, the tragedy of Pompeii brought on by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, is the most famous. Currently, these intelligently designed geologic occurrences cause hundreds of thousands of deaths every year and will continue to kill millions as long as humans walk the earth. This is not the worst of it by a long shot.

Our paper thin atmosphere (75 miles deep compared to the 7,926 mile diameter of the planet) is agitated by friction generated by the rotation of the planet, high energy particles from the sun as well as the gravitational effects of the sun and the moon which affect the oceans. The end result is the movement of conflicting air masses and atmospheric moisture around the planet that we call weather. The patterns of weather over a long period of time or over large land masses, is what we call climate. The weather, as we all know, can be
just as deadly as the movement of the earth's crust. It causes numerous deadly disasters: floods, landslides, forest fires and deaths from lighting strikes, tornadoes and hurricanes, blizzards, droughts and the associated famines. All of these 'natural' phenomena kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people every year.

There are many experts who believe the planet is moving into a period of its climate cycle that will be characterized by weather much more violent than what man has observed in decades, centuries or thousands of years since the last ice age. This will surely translate into many more thousands of people dying violent deaths through no fault of their own. Bottom line, at any moment, you or I, or any person living on the face of planet earth might be smashed, burned, electrocuted, drowned, frozen, smothered to death or blown into the next county by naturally occurring weather of this so-called intelligently designed planet.

Our planet is literally a 'dog-eat-dog' world. Nearly every living thing, from the tiniest insect to the largest animal on the planet, exists by victimizing some other living creature or plant. This intelligent design dictates the stalking, a ferocious attack, a savage killing and devouring of prey animals (Bambi, Buggs Bunny and Alvin the chipmunk, to name a few) by carnivores like the Big Bad Wolf, Wiley Coyote and the Lion King, vicious killers, all.

Those who believe in Intelligent Design must surely believe in creation. Man, supposedly created in the image of the intelligent designer, is the one animal that kills not only for food and clothing which is necessary for survival, but also for sport, in total disregard for the pain and suffering of lower species that are, none the less, creations of the intelligent designer. It would be one thing if that was the extent of human cruelty. But man's inhumanity to man far exceeds the cruelty shown to lower animals. The barbarity, of this creation of intelligent design, is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. During the last century it reached a pinnacle (thus far) when tens of millions of innocent men, women and children were butchered in genocidal pogroms by their fellow men for reasons only a Nazi mad man or Communist dictator can fully comprehend. Not only that, around the world and in every religion or denomination, the people who claim to worship the intelligent designer and live by his credo are the ones most likely to discriminate and deny basic human dignity to others because of some characteristic, like skin color, that was bestowed upon them by the intelligent designer.

Humans, despite our ability to cogitate, have for centuries lived a precarious existence. Early man was the helpless victim of numerous natural diseases, plagues and pestilence. The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide. Some estimates put the death toll as high as 100 million. We are only one sneeze away from a repeat of that scenario during any given flu season. Malaria, Yellow fever and other deseases take thousands of lives annually in tropical regions of the world. Insects have forever been barely beaten back in the competition for food and in some third world countries they are winning the fight. Snakes, scorpions, jellyfish and other poisonous creatures have taken a toll of human life throughout history and will continue to do so in spite of our huge technological advancements.

The sciences of geology and paleontology have proven all but conclusively that at least five mass extinctions of life on earth have taken place within the past 540 million years. The last, which took place 65 million years ago, ended the reign of the dinosaurs and paved the way for the ascent of man. This mass extinction was most probably caused by a meteor that screamed in from space and slammed into the planet. What caused the extinction before that is anybody's guess. But There can be little doubt that Homo sapiens would not have evolved to become the dominate life form if the dinosaurs had not been wiped out.

So we see that what the believers call Intelligent Design is neither intelligent nor a coherent design. Rather, we live out our lives in a chaotic, random, utterly non-caring environment that is immune to impetration and may end our existence at any moment. On any particular day, a gigantic piece of debris that has drifted in space for billions of years could randomly plow into the planet and doom us all. The sun could very well have a fifty million year cycle where it emits radiation of an intensity that nearly strips the planet of life. Or perhaps the sun's energy output will subside and the next ice age will wipe out all civilization in the northern hemisphere. It's possible that a nearby star will go nova and fry our solar system. It could be that next week a Gamma ray burst, from a star one-hundred light-years away will bath the earth in life destroying Gamma rays that sterilizes the planet. We just don't know what is coming down the pike in this intelligently designed, hostile universe. We can only speculate on how or when the next mass extinction on earth will take place. How it will impact the destiny of mankind is in the realm of the unknown or science fiction. In the ten minutes it took you to read this piece, hundreds of people, men, women and helpless children around the world, have suffered and died from natural disasters. We never know when a headline in tomorrow's newspaper will announce another mass killing on the scale of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Or yesterday's headline about the catastrophe like the historic earthquake and tsunami that just devastated north-eastern Japan.

If the world as we know it is the product of Intelligent Design, that designer must be the most aloof, uncaring, blood-thirsty and megalomanical being imaginable. So there is one thing we can count on, if the human race is wiped out, it will come with absolutely no regard for the hopes and dreams of a puny race of animals like Homo sapins. The end when it comes, for sure will be a part of the continuing devastation of "Intelligent Design" and will the perfect end of humanity.